[usui]

Lol every time I see the word "feet" I'm reminded that this article isn't targeted to anyone but Americans, even when talking about manufacturing lines in Asia. My East Asian bias is showing but in all my experience I absolutely have never had to use those units in a serious professional context. Any time I see a technically-sounding article use units like "feet" and "football fields" I subconsciously find it very difficult to take anything afterward seriously.

I admit it's irrational since units are arbitrary and orthogonal anyway, but it seems... forced. Is it really necessary to use those units in a technical context in order to relate to your readers?

EDIT: Lots of America-centric people are jumping onto me for this initial comment, stating that WSJ is built for its /true/ target audience, /Americans/. What sparked my comment was the fact I was reading this article in Japanese. The aforementioned numbers and graph are expressed in feet, so this kind of forced conversion across industry domain and language barrier seemed contrived and got me started on this train of thought.

https://jp.wsj.com/articles/the-chip-shortage-has-made-a-sta...

[dang]

You started a hell of a flamewar with this, and you contributed to perpetuating it too. That's totally not cool here.

Please follow the site guidelines, which include:

"Eschew flamebait. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28448249 and marked it off topic.

[genewitch]

The difference between 185 million ft^2 and whatever you pick doesn't matter. It may as well be in hectares or "multiples of some lake somewhere", it's a massive number.

You have, and are probably using right now, a voice controlled computer that can convert anything to anything else, by just asking.

Is it really worth typing this every time an American site uses American language? We all get it, Americans with their imperial units, ha ha.

[usui]

I think you might have missed that I already stated that it's an irrational thing to complain about because units in nature are arbitrary, but given that no one uses these units for the topic at hand, why use them at all? Just for relatability?

> It may as well be in hectares or "multiples of some lake somewhere", it's a massive number.

We're saying the same thing but arguing for the opposite. Like I said, no one in a technical capacity uses these units seriously. So then if the number is so conceptually massively big and the units don't matter, why go through the extra forced effort of converting to imperial? Just use the units that the specifications come in and the numbers that the factories use?

The more you play with vast unit conversions like this, the more you risk losing information across sources/citations. What if I want to do my own research later on? It's more work if I'm searching for specific numbers on Google. We also know just how terrible Google Search results are getting nowadays, so...

> We all get it, Americans with their imperial units, ha ha.

I think this is an uncharitable interpretation of my comment. I'm not trying to make fun of Americans, I'm trying to understand what the extra efort is worth for?

[elefanten]

Yes, in short it's for relatability. You're talking about a general circulation newspaper -- and one of the very biggest at that.

At the end of the day, their customer is the general American news consumer, and what they read has to make sense to them.

A technical or industry-aware American probably won't go to WSJ first for their technical / industry news.

[cptskippy]

> why use them at all? Just for relatability?

Yes. Was that hard?

The WSJ didn't write this article for you, it isn't an industry rag. This is like complaining that their scientific articles try to dumb it down for a layman's depth.

A football field or soccer field is a perfectly reasonable unit of measure when you're simply trying to convey "a lot" to someone.

[trangus_1985]

I don't particularly agree with the parent comment, but you are being oddly aggressive over something that is a real problem - communicating things is hard and it's a useful topic to consider in a world that increasingly runs on text-based communication.

[cptskippy]

Insulting and making fun of people because they have a problem isn't helpful but ok, but responding "aggressively" to insults is bad?

[scrollaway]

I don't see any insults or "making fun of people" in the comments you're responding to. You're choosing to see that.

Apply the Principle of good faith and you'll see you're the one getting worked up over nothing...

[hermitdev]

Pedantically, at least a standard US football field is an exact size (120yds long, 53 1/3 yds wide).

Soccer pitches? Not so much ... FIFA states the field of play for international matches should be 100-110m long and 64-75m wide (tolerances are relaxed to 90-120m long by 45-90m wide - which oddly means you could have a square pitch). If one would like an example of a comically undersized pitch, look to NYFC playing at Yankee stadium - they had to get a special exemption from MLS, IIRC.

Still useful, though, and I think a reasonable person with familiarity with either soccer or football would get a rough idea.

Please don't take this as criticism ; it's not meant to be. The mention of football and soccer fields being used as a measure of size in the same sentence sparked recollection of some not-otherwise-useful knowledge stuck in my brain.

[cptskippy]

I don't think anyone uses them as exact units of measure but rather to communicate a size in relatable terms. When you relate scale to something familiar it elicits connotations from an individual's experience that makes things easier to comprehend.

Most people have seen a football or soccer field and understand the approximate size.

[OJFord]

> A football field or soccer field is a perfectly reasonable unit of measure when you're simply trying to convey "a lot" to someone.

At least in the UK it's somewhat of a 'meme', a byword for a tabloid, in the same league as irrelevant mentions of age and house price, etc.

[cptskippy]

We measure trunk space in terms of bodies it can hold. It's funny and clearly relates the capacity.

[CRConrad]

We do? Depends on who "we" is, I suppose...

I've seen golf bags mentioned quite often. But, come to think of it, that's about equivalent to a body, isn't it?

[imtringued]

If everyone uses a different unit then it may not appear to be a lot at all. Nobody is measuring office space in football fields so how am I supposed to know how a football field sized manufacturing plant compares to an office building?

[cptskippy]

In general conversation, or general news articles people don't need exact units of measure because they're not acting upon that information. You use an approximation like football fields because it elicits a connotation and can help people easily grasp the scale.

[marcosdumay]

Funny, because it's about 1700Ha, what is a perfectly relatable number, or, if you like your numbers small, 1.7km^2. That's around the size of a district.

[mulmen]

> We all get it, Americans with their imperial units, ha ha.

It's really very tired.

Americans don't even use Imperial units. We use United States Customary Units [1] which are more like siblings to Imperial units than offspring.

United States customary units have been based on familiar Metric units since the Mendenhall Order in 1893.

School children in the United States have studied the metric system for generations.

The United States was one of the original 17 signatories of the Metre Convention in 1875. As far as I can tell no commonwealth countries were early adopters.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_customary_units

[CRConrad]

> United States customary units have been based on familiar Metric units since the Mendenhall Order in 1893.

No. They may be defined in terms of Metric units, but they aren't "based on" them. If they were based on them, they'd be a sensible integer (or decimal-factor) multiple of them, not some weird fractional measure. An inch being 25.4 millimeters may be the current definition of an inch, but that arbitrary length isn't based on anything in the metric world -- it's still just as based on the average length of the top joint of a medieval craftsman's thumb as it's always been.

[mulmen]

Ok, fine, defined in terms of.

There’s nothing odd about the fractional scale, nor is it unique to US Customary Units.

[CRConrad]

No, there's nothing odd about the fact that units based on one set of measures become fractional when expressed in units of another measurement system. It just shows that neither is based on the other.

And of course "the fractional scale is not unique to US Customary Units", since there is no fractional scale within that measurement system. Nor within any other, AFAIK. Your pound consists of an integer number of ounces (right?) and your foot of twelve-point-zerozerozero... inches. The "fractional scale" exists only between measurement systems. (AFAIK. Except maybe old British currency, that was really weird, I'd trust those crazy Englanders to have about six Pi pennies to the shilling or something.)

[mulmen]

The meter is based on a fraction of a second.

[throwaway210222]

> We use United States Customary Units

Actually no, not for potential difference, current, resistance, impedance, luminosity, amount-ofsubstance …

For those you use the SI units.

Its just length, mass, (plus force and torque).

Not far to go.

[mulmen]

The United States does not use "Imperial" units. We use some Customary Units that are defined in terms of SI units and share names with some Imperial units.

The point is that saying "The United States uses Imperial Units" is, generously, ignorant.

[Taniwha]

yes - for example a US fluid Oz is different from everywhere else, as is a cup, a pint, a Venti (twenty what?) and many of the units used in cooking - using American recipes without translation can produce crap - Imperial fluid ounces are totally different largely due tax politics of the 1700/1800s

[mulmen]

Venti is not a US Customary Unit.

[amelius]

> You have, and are probably using right now, a voice controlled computer that can convert anything to anything else, by just asking.

There should be a browser plugin that automatically converts units behind the scenes.

[sandworm101]

"185 million ft^2" and "185 million square feet" are two radically different numbers. One is a square 35 thousand miles on each side. The other is a square 2.6 miles each side.

[bruce343434]

You're thinking of a "(185 million feet) square"

[burkaman]

Yes, it is necessary to use language that is familiar to most of your audience when writing something.

[CivBase]

Well, it is the Wall Street Journal. It shouldn't come as a surprise that an American publication named after an American landmark uses American units.

Americans, myself included, generally acknowledge that the metric system is better but we are already familiar with US units. There's nothing really wrong with US units either in terms of accurate measurement. In an ideal world we would use metric, but transitioning would come at monumental costs - never mind the re-training of an entire population - just so we can make unit conversions a tiny bit easier.

I get it. You're not familiar with US units like we are so you have to do conversions to make sense of the measurements - probably with a calculator since the ratios aren't simple, whole numbers. But remember Americans have to do the same whenever we read almost any foreign publication. Difference is I never see HN or Reddit comments complaining about metric units.

[perl4ever]

A meter seems to me linked to the human body just as much as the foot.

"The metre was originally defined in 1793 as one ten-millionth of the distance from the equator to the North Pole along a great circle"

That factor of ten is because we have ten fingers. There's no cosmic significance to ten or ten million. Or to the size of a line of longitude on our particular planet.

And a meter is almost exactly a yard, or three feet anyway.

[jeroenhd]

The use of the decimal system is kind of funny because for the longest time large parts of Europe used a 20 based system for a lot of common math. You can still see this in French, where 99 is spelled out as "four times twenty and nineteen". Even in English you can find the remains of the 20-based system, because of the way numbers are expressed: twenty-one, but not tenny-one or even one-teen; twenty-five but not onety-five but fifteen.

The foot is directly based on a person's body part (which caused major issues when bordering jurisdictions used different sizes for a "foot"). The denomination used for meters is a lot more disconnected, its basis focused on the planet instead of on a body part. The choice for the decimal system is much more akin to the choice of 3/12/8/10 in the imperial system.

You can also quickly run into issues if you assume a meter is almost exactly a meter, there's a 9% difference there. The difference can quickly add up, and plenty of international orders have been messed up that way. The distances are similar enough that they serve the same use in day to day expressions, but they're certainly not "almost exactly" the same.

[perl4ever]

>its basis focused on the planet instead of on a body part

It was based on both, and both measurements are completely determined by the happenstance of life on earth rather than the laws of nature.

>which caused major issues when bordering jurisdictions used different sizes for a "foot"

The meter has also had varying definitions leading to slightly different values. Obviously if you are going to base it on the size of the earth there is going to be some uncertainty and of course that's not the current definition.

I'm not really trying to convince you or anybody that meters are not superior to yards, just that it's hard to explain why without appealing to prejudice and/or making categorical statements that are false.

>The choice for the decimal system is much more akin to the choice of 3/12/8/10 in the imperial system.

Is it correct to call SI the decimal system? Powers of ten time units never caught on above seconds.

[oblio]

> There's no cosmic significance to ten or ten million.

Cosmic? No. But social? For sure. 99.99% of math the layman will encounter is in base 10.

[perl4ever]

Picture some American saying there's no point in knowing languages other than English because 99.99% of the people you will encounter know it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Standard_Whitworth

[oblio]

Thankfully we're slowly getting rid of that abomination and replacing it with something reasonable:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_metric_screw_thread

A classic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pikrntjcbyw

[cvs268]

You sir/madam, have mastered the art of saying a lot and yet saying nothing.

[dang]

Personal attacks will get you banned here, regardless of how bad another comment is or you feel it is.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.